Sandex co-founder says goodbye to European Union sanctions
The co-founder of the gem of Russian tech company Yandex, Arkady Voloy, officially bid farewell to the group’s 20,000 employees on Friday after resigning in June following the first international sanctions related to Ukraine.
“It’s time for me to write a farewell message. (…) As you know, I haven’t managed Yandex Russia for a long time, and this year I had to leave everything [mes] Positions” within management, he wrote in an internal memo to the company, confirmed to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
In early June, he resigned from the management of Yandex, Russia’s main search engine, which he co-founded in 1997 after he was hit with individual sanctions by the European Union (EU) over Ukraine. “Yandex is the project of my life, but not only mine. Against the background of global competition, we have been doing this together from scratch for 30 years,” recalls 58-year-old Arkadi Voloj.
He also considers the company’s restructuring plan to be “entirely sensible and necessary under the current conditions”. In early December, a close friend of Vladimir Putin, Alexei Kudrin, said he would join Yandex as the company’s “development consultant,” days after management announced a restructuring of the company.
In fact, the company is now split into two entities, one managing operations in Russia and the other managing operations abroad. Yandex is Russia’s leading search engine, but also a dominant player in taxi and delivery services in much of the Russian-speaking world.
The Russian digital sector has been severely affected by the western sanctions against Moscow. Since then, the Kremlin has been trying to replace the products of Western giants that have left the country, while increasing its influence on this strategic sector.